TEXT FILES FOR MICHAEL ABRASH'S 

ZEN OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

All files (c) 1989, 1996 by Michael Abrash.  
All rights reserved. Distributed here by permission.


In 1989, Michael Abrash completed *the* classic work on 8088-oriented code 
optimization.  ZEN OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE was published by Scott, Foresman & 
Company as part of a series of assembly books edited by Jeff Duntemann.  Unfortunately, 
not long after the book was published, Scott, Foresman was acquired by Harper Collins, 
and the larger firm chose not to continue the Scott, Foresman computer trade line.  200 
books perished in the acquisition, and while the world was better off without most of 
them, ZEN OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE vanished as well.

In the intervening years, since quantities of the book in stores were exhausted, many 
people have asked for reprints of ZEN OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE.  The economies of 
publishing do not allow it to be reprinted in its original form, but Michael has arranged to 
make the book available as a set of word processor files on the CD-ROM for the second 
edition of ZEN OF GRAPHICS PROGRAMMING.

There was insufficient time to include scanned bitmaps of the many figures in ZEN OF 
ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE on this first pressing of the CD-ROM, but the figures will be 
available on the Coriolis Web Site: http://www.coriolis.com, under book diskette files.  
Alternately, you can locate the files through ftp from directory  
ftp://coriolis.com/pub/bookdisk/ in several files in the form ZOAFIG??.ZIP, where ?? will 
be a two-digit number representing the chapter from which the figures were taken.  If 
a chapter is not represented it means that that chapter contained no figures.

Future pressings of the CD-ROM will contain all of the figure bitmap files as well as the 
text.

The text files are in two formats on the CD-ROM.  One, in the WP42 subdirectory of ZOA, 
is the Word Perfect 4.2 format, which is still readily importable to many major word 
processors.  The other is RTF, in the RTF subdirectory of ZOA, which is the Rich Text
Format, which is easily importable by Microsoft Word and most newer word processors.

All of the chapters are present except for Chapter 6, which has become lost.  Chapter 
6 simply contains an overview of the 8088 processor, which can be had in other older 
books on PC assembly language.  Michael did not get into any of his trademark Zen 
insights in Chapter 6.  It was presented strictly as foundation knowledge.

The code listings for the book are contained in a self-extracting archive file 
ZEN_LIST.EXE.  Copy this file to a subdirectory and execute it.  The listing files will be 
extracted into the subdirectory.
